Communism Survivor Blasts CRT

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LEESBURG, VA (ChurchMilitant.com) -  A Virginia mother who endured the horrors of Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution in China is denouncing left-wing racial ideology.

Xi Van Fleet blasted the Loudoun County School Board (LCSB) Tuesday at a public meeting over its strident support of Critical Race Theory (CRT). In a chastisement that went viral, she compared using CRT in the U.S. public school system with what happened during China's cultural revolution.

"You are teaching, training our children to be social justice warriors and to loathe our country and our history," Van Fleet said. "Growing up in Mao's China seems very familiar. The communist regime used the same critical theory to divide people. The only difference is that they used class instead of race."

During the 1960s and 1970s, Maoist forces sought to fundamentally transform that country, upending its lifestyle and killing hundreds of thousands to millions of people to do it.

"Critical race theory has its roots in cultural Marxism," she added. "It should have no place in our schools."

CRT is described by proponents in relatively benign terms as "a way of understanding how American racism has shaped public policy." But troubling aspects of the theory rear their head for parents and patriots including its looking at all of life through the lens of race and dividing people into racists or anti-racists. 

Ibram X. Kendi, CRT activist and author of How to Be An Antiracist advocates for out-and-out discrimination against privileged groups to create "equity" — a term placing emphasis on equal outcomes instead of equal opportunities. In other words, as Breitbart succinctly put it recently: "racism cannot be defeated by refraining from hatred and discrimination; it requires an active posture of antiracism" that means "discrimination [against white people] in service of evening up those demographic stats on wealth, status and safety."

Derrick Bell, one of the founders of CRT, views Dr. Martin Luther King's civil rights movement as "regrettable," making passé King's standard of judging people not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. 

Barack Obama, who once praised the "excellence" of Bell's scholarship, recently slammed resistance to CRT. "Lo and behold, the single most important issue to them [right-wing media] apparently right now is critical race theory. Who knew that that was the threat to our republic?" he commented in an interview with Anderson Cooper.

Loudoun County, Virginia is the wealthiest county in the nation. It has become the unlikely epicenter of the CRT controversy. Distance learning, prompted by COVID-19, set off the chain of events leading to the ongoing controversy — as at-home parents began overhearing what teachers were teaching their children.

LCSB members, in turn, began compiling lists of "enemy" parents suspected of opposing CRT. They set up plans to infiltrate their gatherings, with the goal of publicly exposing and humiliating them.

Loudoun county parents uncovered the plot and pushed back, launching a petition campaign on the Fight for Schools website to recall school board members who targeted them.

Loudoun county teacher Tanner Cross was suspended after criticizing proposed policies for recognizing gender and preferred pronouns. He garnered enthusiastic support from parents and was subsequently temporarily reinstated by a judge.

"Where is your regard for our freedom of speech?" a mother of three asked the school board. "When I saw a teacher ... suspended for expressing his religious beliefs, I could no longer stay silent. When did it become acceptable to be tolerant only when someone expresses a view that we agree with?"

Van Fleet is not the only one to notice similarities between CRT and communist ideology.

In a June 10 article in The American Conservative, Stephen Sholl, who graduated from the Loudoun County public schools — in the days before CRT — noted striking similarities between CRT and the education policy of the Communist Party that ruled Hungary during the Cold War.

Sholl, who is studying Hungarian history and culture in the Budapest Fellowship Program, explained when the Soviets overthrew Hungary's "nascent" democracy in the last 1940s, the Soviets did a full-court press to "convert" Hungary through educational policies reminiscent of CRT. 

"[T]rue education was sacrificed on the altar of politics, and Hungary’s education system became little more than a glorified system of indoctrination," he said of that time in Hungarian history.

"Like CRT, the communist education system was based on impressing to students that their society, and particularly their history, was nothing more than a story of oppressors and victims. Instead of race, however, this system of oppression — according to the Marxist dogma — was based on class, property and religion," Sholl added.

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